


The Last Goddamned Unicorn

by amosanguis



Series: author's fave [112]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Last Unicorn Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Humor, BAMF Witch Kono Kalakaua, Bad Guy John McGarrett, Beautiful Dumb Human Steve McGarrett, Beautiful Smart Human Chin Ho Kelly, Body Horror, Falling In Love, Gen, Graphic Description, Grumpiest Unicorn Danny Williams, M/M, Pre-Slash, Road Trip, Very Brief Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 03:19:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17841446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amosanguis/pseuds/amosanguis
Summary: “Wait, wait, Danno,” Steve says, gripping Danny’s shoulders – trying to force him to justpausefor a second, “why are you running away from an energy drink?”Danny blinks. “Oh my god, Steve, no, no—you big, dumb, beautiful idiot. Notared bull –theRed Bull.TheRed Bull, Steven.”





	The Last Goddamned Unicorn

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Not an exact remake of TLU, but my own take on it with respect given to the H50 characters – so expect deviations. 
> 
> 2) Quotes, some of which have been trimmed, are from the book _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter S. Beagle.
> 
> 3) The summary is the exact conversation that popped into my head and started this whole mess. And I say mess because this was only supposed to be about 5k and then that didn't happen.
> 
> 4) Has not been beta'd so please forgive any mistakes, or kindly point them out.
> 
> 5) Some vaguely spoiler-y additional warnings/tag explanations in the end notes.

I.

_Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves – for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides._

 

The men bumble through the unicorn’s forest, cursing, their rifles that were slung over their shoulders getting heavier with each passing hour. The unicorn knows what they’re looking for, and he knows they won’t find it here – once upon a time, the men themselves might have known that, might have read all the signs. But those days were gone it seemed, and so the unicorn had to suffer the sounds of hunters in his forest.

The unicorn snorts; men were slow and stupid and forgot easily.

He supposes he shouldn’t blame them – they lived such short lives, they never get the chance to learn much of anything. It was honestly a wonder that they hadn’t chased magic completely from the world.

“Fuckin’ bullshit, dude,” the first man is saying. “We’ve been wandering all around this place without a sign of anything.”

“I’m tellin’ you,” the second says, heaving a heavy sigh, “Ricky told me he saw this huge buck – said it came right up to him.”

“Ricky’s spent too much of his time looking through his damn binoculars for whatever bird is on his mind – how’d he even see a buck?”

The unicorn thinks back, thinks he knows the man the hunter calls Ricky. Ricky was a hunter of sorts himself, but he brought no weapons with him, only pencil and paper and device he took photographs with; he was a little man whose presence hadn’t immediately irritated the unicorn, and for that alone, was welcomed in the unicorn’s forest.

“I don’t know,” the second man says, he stops and looks around. “I don’t even know what he could be looking for around here – I haven’t seen anything. Not even a squirrel.”

 “Let’s fuck outta here,” the first hunter says, turning and walking back the way they’d come. “There’s another forest a little bit further south – the deer there are a lot less shy. I tagged a ten-pointer there a couple weeks ago.”

The unicorn is just moving off, thinking of heading towards the pond that sat in the middle of a clearing, the pond and the clearing both had been manufactured by the unicorn himself when he’d been young, when he pauses.

He had a foal in the forest to the south. And even though time tends to escape him, just as it does all unicorns and other immortal creatures, he knows that she shouldn’t yet be old enough to have left her mother’s side to search for a forest of her own. So, if the foal and her mother were still in that forest, how could the hunters have found anything to hunt?

The unicorn watches the hunters leave and he wonders.

 

 

II.

_The long road hurried to nowhere and had no end._

 

No matter how he tries, the unicorn can’t put the thought from his mind.

The unicorn paces by his pond, startling the frogs and the dragonflies from their places in the afternoon sunlight, not paying much mind to the whispering and gossiping of the birds in the trees overhead.

 Had something happened to his foal? What of her mother? What could possibly have happened to her that her magic was no longer enough to protect the creatures of her forest? Unicorns could be killed, yes, but not within their own territories – not when no bullet nor arrow could ever catch them; not when men had no eyes to see a unicorn except to see them as a white horse or, on one memorable occasion, a white deer.

He snorts and stamps his cloven hoof to the dirt, paws at the ground, until he couldn’t take it any longer.

He had to know.

 

The unicorn leaves his forest and heads southward.

Immediately he sees that much has changed in the world around him while he hadn’t been paying it any attention.

Dirt roads have turned to black stone and horse-drawn carriages have given way to sleek metal ones that seem to move under their own power. He’d seen vehicles like this before, but smaller and two-wheeled – men would ride them through his forest on occasion, their whooping combined with the awful ruckus of the vehicles themselves had frightened him the first time he’d seen and heard them.

After that first time, though, their noises had been a nuisance and the unicorn would give it all a wide berth. If he’d been in a foul mood, however, he’d chase both the vehicle and their rider, learning quickly that a quick thrust of his horn could gouge a hole in the rear wheel – sending the vehicle crashing into the dirt. And before the human could get their bearings, the unicorn would disappear himself into the trees.

The unicorn smirks to himself as he remembers these things as he canters down the black road.

 

He reaches the forest he knows his foal should be in – but he doesn’t even have to step inside its bounds to know that there is no unicorn here. And, judging by the foliage and the ragged looking she-fox peering at him from under the nearby brush, there hasn’t been one for some time.

“Where is the unicorn of this forest?” he asks the fox.

The fox remains silent.

The unicorn thinks of his own forest and returning to it, but he shakes the thought from his head with an annoyed snort – he needed answers. The fox, surely thinking the snort was aimed at herself, curls further inward – all but disappearing. The unicorn is just starting to turn away, when a whispered voice calls out to him.

“Something came,” it’s the she-fox, her words clipped in that peculiar way of her species. “Big, red. Angry. Stole them.”

“What could steal a unicorn from their forest?” the unicorn asks as he tries to remember patience, making a pointed effort not to lie his ears flat against his skull.

“Bull,” the she-fox answers, still in a clipped whisper. “Big, red. Angry. Stole them. The bull ox did.”

The unicorn stares. He opens his mouth – not exactly sure what he wants to ask, but the fox interrupts.

“Not just them,” she says, her yellow eyes flicking to the forest at her back. “ _All_.”

“All?”

“ _Stole_ ,” the she-fox says, something urgent in her tone, “ _stole all_. _All unicorns_.”

“Impossible,” the unicorn snaps, stamping his hoof for emphasis. “A bull ox can’t steal all of the unicorns – and certainly not from their own—”

“You asked,” the she-fox says, scrambling out from under her bush and backing away quickly, “I told. Bull. Big, red. Angry. Stole them all.”

“Where?” the unicorn asks, dropping his pretenses and letting his ears flatten back and his horn shine. “ _Where_ did the bull take the unicorns?”

The she-fox breaks away and runs, throwing only one word over her shoulder before she disappears: “West.”

The unicorn huffs as he looks at the trail left by the fox for a moment before he turns away from it and leaves the forest.

 

The unicorn heads west, avoiding the largest towns and cities where he can. As he passes through, he notices that it seemed as if all the land was cut up with fences and roads, and the bison tell him that it was the way men organized who owned what.

“Who says that men own the land?” the unicorn asks with a shake of his head.

“The men do, of course,” the bison answers, sharing a commiserating snort, before returning to her grazing. “You’ve been in your forest a long time, unicorn, and you’ve missed much. Perhaps you should return to it? While there is still time and before you find yourself hunted alongside the rest of us.”

“Men don’t even know to see me anymore,” the unicorn says, before he falls quiet.

The unicorn grazes with the bison and her herd for a time, watching as the young frolic and play. He himself had never felt the pull to watch over his own young – he had thought her safe with her mother in her mother’s forest and had been satisfied with that.

After a time, he turns back to the bison and asks her and her fellows if they’ve seen anything of a big, red bull.

“The Red Bull,” the bison shakes herself, as if trying to shake off a nasty insect, “I know only that he exists, but no more.”

The unicorn sighs then and takes his leave.

 

The unicorn lays down on a bed of clover, a full moon hanging high in the sky. He’d needed rest – he’s needed it for days now, denying himself as he pushed onwards, spurned on by the words of his fellow creatures.

The tales alternated between vague descriptions of a red bull, and ones of horror – an ox made of nightmares and fire, driving unicorns across the plains and over the mountains and even through an ocean.

But, because only the birds have seen what happen once the bull makes it over the mountains, and birds – large or small, seed- or carrion-eater – they were all prone to understatements (and when you see so much of everything, not one thing seems much bigger than anything else). Some of the birds say the bull drove them into the ocean and then left them there; others say that the bull chased them into the water and kept them swimming for days to reach some island or another. All say they don’t remember much, as it’d been so long ago, and, say, wouldn’t the unicorn like to hear of much better, more recent happenings?

The unicorn had shaken his head and left the birds to their gossip with the groundhogs and the squirrels, had chosen instead to think on what he’d heard in the silence of his journey, broken only by the sound of his own hooves striking the road. And when it’d become too much to think on, and his exhaustion had truly caught up with him, that was when the unicorn had decided to rest.

Of what the birds had said – he didn’t know what to believe and instead he had hoped that maybe some sleep could clear his mind.

If only he hadn’t slept so hard.

 

When the unicorn awakes – he is caged.

 

 

III.

 _The lead wagon was driven by a squat old woman, and it bore signs on its shrouded sides that said in big letters:_ MOMMY FORTUNA’S MIDNIGHT CARNIVAL _. And below, in small print:_ Creatures of night, brought to light.

 

When he first wakes, the unicorn rears as much as he’s able, neighing and slamming his cloven hooves down against the boards beneath him. He snorts and paws at the floor, kicking up straw. He wants to throw himself against the bars that hold him, that separate him from the outside – but he can’t quite bring himself to do it. An evilness lay within that metal, a curse if he’s ever seen one, and it whispers and smirks and chides him for all his naivete that allowed him to get caught.

He’s glaring at the bars when a slim woman walks up to him. She raises her hand like she’s going to touch the bars, but then she winces and slowly returns her hand to her side.

The unicorn watches her, but he feels tired suddenly as the curse begins to work and weigh on him – those damn bars won’t _shut up_.

“ _Aloha_ , unicorn,” the woman says. “I’m sorry for this. Really and truly, I am.”

The unicorn doesn’t understand the exact meaning of the woman’s greeting, but he hears the truth in her apology though he’s not soothed by it. So he looks past her words and into _her_. She radiates magic and kindness, and there was an innocence to her that didn’t seem to fit anyone who would be found in a place like this; she carried an almost sort of Otherness, one that was similar to the unicorn’s, though not as poignant.

“What is this?” he asks. “And who are you?”

The woman steps to the side and makes a sweeping gesture at the other trailers. “What do you see?” she asks.

The unicorn lifts his head as much as he’s able, looking out into the darkness.

Despite the electric lights in the distance, the immediate circle of five trailers was lit only with medieval fire torches and the light of that round moon; the flames flickering ominously off the metal of the trailers, bouncing, refracted and reflected, from the dark eyes of the creatures within them.

A pair of men were leading a group from one trailer to another – speaking fantastically in lilting accents about the creatures contained within. One trailer, they said, held a manticore, another a satyr, and yet another Cerberus himself. But in them, the unicorn saw only a sick lion, a twisted old ape, and a half-starved dog.

He says as much to the woman standing quietly beside his trailer.

“Wo Fat and his illusions,” the woman says, nodding. “He keeps the lie going as best he can, tells people they can’t take pictures or videos. And those two,” she points at the tour guides, “the Hesse brothers, Victor and Anton, they could sell coals as diamonds to royalty.”

The unicorn goes to ask the woman who she is once more – but, just past the woman, he sees _her_ , he sees the harpy.

“She’s real,” the unicorn says, craning his neck to get a better look at the harpy, to take her all in.

The woman goes to say something, but one of the Hesse brothers spots her and calls out, “Get away from there, witch!”

The witch ducks away from the unicorn’s trailer with a whispered promise to return later in the night. No sooner is she gone, then the Hesse who hadn’t called out is leading the group to the harpy’s trailer.

Surprising the unicorn, the man calls the harpy by her true name, Celaeno.

Celaeno meets the unicorn’s eyes and flaps her large, bronze wings, her feathers creating a metallic scraping sound as they move against each other, the harpy sharing a smirk with him as the shorter of the brothers steps back with a snarl.

 

The witch comes back not long before the moon has settled below the horizon. She introduces herself as Kono Kalakua and she promises that can free him, she just needs time.

“I don’t have time,” the unicorn says, still trying to shake the weariness that’s settling deeper and deeper into his bones. “I must find the rest of the unicorns. I must find the Red Bull.”

“I can help,” Kono promises. “Look, we’re almost done in here, then we’re going back to Hawai’i.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something to me,” the unicorn snaps, stomping his hoof, “and it doesn’t.”

“There’s someone there who can help,” Kono says. “And, if I’ve heard right, the Red Bull is there.”

The unicorn shakes his head. “Well, why didn’t you just say that?”

Kono opens her mouth to add something else, but the sound of the approaching Hesse brothers, accompanied by someone else, drives Kono away and she disappears into the shadows as if she was made of them herself.

 

 

IV.

_“Do not boast, old woman. Your death sits in that cage and hears you.”_

 

Wo Fat, owner and proprietor of _Wo Fat’s Carnival_ , was as arrogant and stupid as any other human the unicorn had come into contact with. He believed that it was skill that had led him to the capture of a harpy and a unicorn, and not just dumb luck.

“Think whatever you like of me,” Wo Fat sneers, leveling a twisted and burn-scarred finger to point at the unicorn, “you’re still in _my cage_. No other witch nor warlock has done what I have done.”

The unicorn snorts and shakes his head, “And did you never stop to think of _why_?”

“They lack courage—”

“They have sense,” the unicorn interrupts, raising his voice and snapping his teeth together at the bars for emphasis. “They have more sense than you; they know better and they’ll live longer for it. Let us go. The harpy and I are not for the likes of you, illusionist.”

Wo Fat just smirks.

“I heard you asking about the Red Bull,” he says, changing the subject – and the unicorn can’t help but listen intently.

“What do you know of him?” the unicorn demands.

“The Bull belongs to a man named John McGarrett,” Wo Fat says. “A shame, really. McGarrett has the Bull and he’s used it to hide the unicorns instead of—” Wo Fat trails off, lifting his eyebrows and shrugging, as if the unicorn could fill in what Wo Fat wasn’t saying. The unicorn wants to ask, but then Wo Fat is continuing. “Don’t worry, unicorn, we won’t be in Hawai’i for very long; the Red Bull won’t have a chance to find you. I’ll protect you.”

The unicorn bites down on his reply, watching instead as Wo Fat and the silent Hesse brothers move away and back into the darkness.

 

There’s a second and then a third night filled with touring humans and every hour of it gets harder and harder for the unicorn to bear.

Kono stops by when she can, when she’s not entertaining the groups with her elaborate card tricks and pulling flowers from the ears of children and rabbits from the ground as if they were growing there – all of it, surprisingly, giving off the faint scent of true magic. So the unicorn asks her what a true witch was doing working for the likes of Wo Fat, and Kono just shrugs and looks away.

“His carnival circuit includes Hawai’i,” she says. “I joined him when I blew my knee while I was surfing – I was young and angry, and I just wanted to get away from everything. And here I am now, wanting nothing more than to return home and never leave it again.”

Sensing her sadness, the unicorn asks what surfing is and he watches bemused as Kono’s face lights up. With a wave of her hand, she conjures up a bottle of water and after twisting the cap off, wiggles her fingers and calls the water from the bottle – she talks excitedly as the water twirls around her and illustrates what she’s saying.

The unicorn wonders if she even notices that, even though she never incanted a spell, the water had simply _listened_ to her. And he figures then that Kono may not be fully aware of her true power.

 

The morning of the fourth day breaks to a cloudless sky and a flurry of activity as the unicorn and the others are readied for transport. Trailers were hitched to trucks, food and water was refilled, and Wo Fat made his rounds to each cage, whispering words to strengthen the locks and the curses on the iron bars – spending most of his time at the harpy’s trailer.

“The truth of us drains you more and more each day, doesn’t it, illusionist?” the unicorn asks, not bothering to keep the sneer from his voice.

“Whatever happens to me when this is over,” Wo Fat says to the unicorn though he never looks away from the harpy, “it will always be true that Wo Fat held a harpy, and a unicorn, in his carnival.” He looks at the unicorn then. “No one can take that from me, and neither you nor the harpy will ever forget my face, nor the days you spent under my control.”

Anger, white hot and burning, rises through the unicorn and for a brief moment, Wo Fat’s spells fall to the wayside as the unicorn rears in his trailer, screaming a challenge. But as soon as he’d powered through them, the spells slam back against the unicorn, seemingly twice as powerful as before as they force the unicorn’s knees to buckle.

Wo Fat’s laughter echoes in his ears for the rest of the morning.

By the time the sun has reached its peak in the sky – the caravan is on the road.

The fourth day bleeds into a fifth, sixth, and then seventh.

The unicorn can’t see very much outside of his trailer, but he knows they pass through a desert and then a small mountain range, and then there’s the sounds and scents of the ocean and the sea birds.

“What’s happening now?” the unicorn asks Kono, his voice quiet, subdued – he’s been wrung through with exhaustion, heavily weighted down by Wo Fat’s spells and curses.

Kono sets her jaw and points at the largest metal vehicle that the unicorn has ever seen, only this one, instead of running on the black roads, was sitting in the water. “We’re sailing for Hawai’i,” she says. “We’ll be there in just a few days. Once we hit land, I’ll get you free – I swear it.”

The unicorn snorts and shrinks away from her and the cold cackling of his bars.

 

 

V.

 _So they circled one another like a double star, and under the shrunken sky there was nothing real but the two of them_.

 

The land has just disappeared over the horizon when the unicorn first notices that the whispering of his bars had fallen silent. He glances at the harpy’s trailer across from him and, judging by her smirk, her’s had as well.

“Almost,” the harpy whispers, fluttering her bronze wings, filling the air between them with the clinking of her feathers knocking together. “ _Almost_.”

The unicorn shudders and turns away from her. Though he rejoices in Wo Fat’s magic finally beginning to give way, he knew this fight wasn’t quite over.

 

If there’s nothing else about this journey, the unicorn learns that he does _not_ travel well by sea.

“I’ll be leaving this to the fish alone,” he says to Kono during one of her visits. “This is not a journey for unicorns.”

All Kono can do is nod at him and offer him kind words and soft songs that he cares nothing for.

 

The ship pulls into the harbor under thick cover of darkness, the moonlight blotted out by a heavy cloud-cover for which the unicorn knows the harpy is responsible. All of the other creatures are taken off the ship first – the lion and the ape and the dog – before Wo Fat comes to stand before the unicorn and the harpy. Wo Fat waves his hands over their locks, checking them.

“You look tired,” the unicorn says, enjoying the truth of his words. “Last chance, Wo Fat. Let us go and I can make sure the harpy does not kill you.”

Wo Fat did in fact look pale and worn, with sweat beading on his forehead and wetting his hair, his magic having been stretched so thin and for so long. He just glares at the unicorn and says nothing in return.

 

The trailers are on the pier and the Hesse brothers and Wo Fat have gone to fetch vehicles to attach the trailers to, when Kono comes out of the dark, a ring of keys twirling around a long finger.

“Oh, look at you,” the unicorn says, ears perked as he listens to the lock on his trailer door sneer and insult Kono.

“I’d try some fancy spell,” Kono says, shrugging her shoulders, “but I don’t travel well either, so I figured we’d just take the shortcut with some pickpocketed keys.”

“Works for me,” the unicorn says – just as his trailer door is flying open. He jumps out and immediately all of the lingering effects of Wo Fat’s spells fall away from him – he tosses his head and bucks a little, dancing to the side and arching his neck as he prances away from the trailer, Kono grinning wide at him, her tinkling laughter following his steps.

“ _You_ ,” comes a sudden, hoarse cry.

The unicorn and Kono look towards the voice and see the Hesse brothers running towards them – it’d been Victor who’d yelled.

“Run,” Kono shouts at the unicorn, “I’ll hold them off.”

The unicorn snorts and shakes his head but finds himself doing as he’s told. Kinda. He does run. But he runs towards the other trailers – ignoring the sounds of scuffling behind him, of punches and kicks connecting and shouted incantations.

A quick tap of his horn is all it takes to break the locks of the other trailers and he doesn’t spare a glance for the animals escaping, instead focusing on the last trailer.

He hears Kono calling out a warning, another order to “Run, damn you” – but the unicorn is watching the harpy, and the harpy him.

“Release me, brother,” she whispers to him, her voice as ancient as he is and sickly sweet.

The unicorn regards her for a moment, but then he lowers his head and taps his horn to the lock of her trailer.

All at once, a wind builds up as the harpy spreads her huge wings – the trailer exploding outward, and the unicorn dances backwards just in time to avoid getting hit by the debris. The harpy’s cackle fills the night as she flies up into the sky, the clouds clearing at her call as she flies into the waning moon. Then she’s turning, whirling around and tucking her wings in.

The unicorn neighs and rears up, kicks his forelegs out and meets her talons with a thrust of his glowing horn. The harpy laughs and spins away and flies upward once more.

“We have to go,” Kono says, appearing at the unicorn’s side, she’s bleeding heavily from a cut in her eyebrow and already a bruise is forming.

The unicorn nods and says, “Stay beside me. Walk.” Kono is vibrating with her adrenaline – obviously wanting nothing else but to run, but the unicorn’s voice is firm. “ _Walk_ ,” he says again, catching her eyes in the dark, “and don’t look back.”

Above them, the harpy cries out but this time, in her dive, the unicorn is not her target. They hear bones break and flesh tear as the harpy finishes off first Anton, then Victor Hesse.

“They ran,” the unicorn says, his voice low. “Never run from anything immortal, Kono, it attracts their attention.”

Kono nods and she raises a hand and fists it in the unicorn’s long mane, the unicorn wonders at himself for not feeling any desire to shake her loose. They’ve almost disappeared into the night when they hear Wo Fat’s throaty chuckle.

But it’s neither the unicorn nor Kono he’s laughing at as he then screams at the harpy, goading her.

A shriek fills the air—

—soon followed only by silence.

 

 

VI.

_Heavy heads turned on nodding necks, and all saw the village’s cows and sheep and horses clustered at the far end of the field, staring at the magician’s white mare, who was placidly cropping the cool grass. No animal made a noise. Even the pigs and geese were as silent as ghosts._

_“They see what you have forgotten how to see.”_

 

The unicorn wanted nothing to do with the busy streets of Honolulu – the port in which _Wo Fat’s Carnival_ had pulled into.

Escaping the docks had been a fiasco and an exercise in patience for the unicorn as he and Kono manage to outmaneuver the guards and workers and a few other mortals Kono had warned the unicorn were up to nothing good. So, once they’d found themselves clear of all of it, the unicorn had began trotting towards the scent of trees – Kono following along obediently.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” she’d asked.

“There’s a quiet place up ahead,” the unicorn had answered, his ears swiveling as he took in his surroundings. “It’s small, but we can hide there and rest before we can rid ourselves of this city entirely. I hate cities.”

Kono had cocked her head and looked around herself in all directions, as if trying to get her bearings. Then she’d broken into a jog, and said, “There’s a botanical garden up here – it’s not much, but it’ll do for now.”

As soon as they’d arrived, easily gaining access through the light fencing, the unicorn had felt himself settle. As they had settled in to rest for the night, the unicorn had touched his horn to the side of Kono’s face – healing her injuries, and making Kono smile up at him before she curled up next to the unicorn, the unicorn’s long neck curving around her so his head was in her lap, and like that, they quickly feel asleep. Kono had woken the unicorn at dawn to tell him they should leave before the employees came to open shop.

Now, the unicorn was facing Kono in the early morning light, arguing about whether or not the unicorn should accompany her out into the city to find whoever it was that she was going to look for. The unicorn had no desire to step out into the city except to escape to higher ground and thicker cover for the remainder of the day, agreeing only to come back to the garden in the evening to touch base with Kono.

“Go and get your friend you said could help me,” the unicorn says, stamping his hoof, “I’ll be right here when you return.”

“I think you’re overreacting.”

“I said what I said.”

Kono blew out a hard breath and they stared at each other for a minute that quickly bled into five. Having enough of the staring contest, the unicorn simply turned away and walked deeper into the mass of trees.

“Why are unicorns so stubborn,” Kono yells at his back, stamping her own foot.

The unicorn doesn’t even bother looking back at her, but he does listen carefully as she moves away from him – heading out of the garden before jumping over the fence.

 

Kono is gone for most of the day, during which the unicorn manages to slip from the garden himself, through the city, and up into the sloping forests of the island; there, he tries to talk to the animals around him – _try_ being the key word.

It didn’t help much that the unicorn didn’t recognize many of the creatures – and few recognized him in return except as something old, immortal, and beautiful.

The birds here were strange looking and couldn’t seem to bring themselves to do much except look at him with awe before turning to whisper at each other; the small reptiles that scurried beneath his hooves knew no languages; the boar were an angry and jealous sort – mimicking the unicorn’s graceful steps even as they screamed at him.

The butterflies seemed to be the only decent company as they flitted about and landed on the unicorn’s horn, singing songs and reciting pretty poems in all the languages they’ve heard, even if they didn’t know the meaning of the words.

So, having learned nothing new of the Red Bull nor the other unicorns from the other animals, the unicorn returned to the dense trees of the garden, walking quietly to escape the notice of the humans who wandered around him, before settling down in the thick grass and resigning himself to watching and listening to the singing butterflies who had followed him back to the garden.

He’s listening to one butterfly singing about R-E-S-P-E-C-T and what it means to her, the song intertwining strangely with a song about Christmas and what it meant on the islands of Hawai’i that was being sung by another butterfly, when he hears human voices coming nearer. The unicorn recognizes Kono’s voice immediately and neighs out a greeting.

Kono comes into view as she turns around a large tree with a man at her side – there’s a familial resemblance between them but for the sharper cut of man’s cheekbones. The man is talking gently to Kono, almost patronizing, but he stops midstride as soon as he catches sight of the unicorn. The unicorn catches Kono’s smug look as he stands and trots over to her.

“Does he know me?” the unicorn asks Kono.

And before Kono can answer, the man himself answers. “Hell yeah, I know you,” he says, then he slaps a hand over his mouth and turns to Kono. “Can I talk like that in front of him?”

The unicorn shakes himself, “Your language doesn’t offend me,” he says, “only your cities do. That and someone has used the Red Bull to steal my kind from their forests – including my own foal.”

“That’s what we need to talk about, Chin,” Kono says to the man. “Do you remember that rumor a little while ago? About John McGarrett?”

 

The rumor was that John McGarrett went mad after burying his wife. So mad that he sent his children away and never spoke to them nor of them again, saying he couldn’t stand to be distracted as he looked for ways to bring his dear Doris back from the dead.

Chin says that it was during his grief that the Red Bull came to him – that the Red Bull serves only those who don’t know fear. And John McGarrett knew no fear. John knew only his pain and he knew unicorns – an immortal creature who could have saved Doris from death had one been around to do so. Now, whether it was vengeance or greed or something else, Chin couldn’t say, he could only say that John McGarrett sent the Red Bull to gather all the unicorns and to bring them to him.

“And where are they now?” the unicorn asks, becoming more and more impatient with the story. “I had heard from birds that they may be trapped in the ocean. Could that be true?”

“You guess is as good as mine,” Chin says, hanging his head, not quite able to meet the unicorn’s stony, depthless eyes. “About where you might find the Red Bull, however,” Chin says slowly, mulling the idea over in his head before glancing up, his eyes darting between Kono’s and the unicorn’s, “I think I might have an idea.”

“What’re you thinking, cuz?” Kono asks.

“Lava tubes.”

“Just tell me we won’t have to remain long in the city to get to them,” the unicorn says.

Chin grins and says, “They’re not in the city. At least, not the one that’s large enough to house the Bull.”

The unicorn tosses his head in a determined way and says, “Good, good. Lead the way then.”

 

“It’s called a motorcycle,” Chin says when he sees the Look the unicorn is giving to his vehicle.

“It’s called an annoyance,” the unicorn says, his disdain thick in his voice. “Many a human has ridden smaller versions of these things through my home forest just to find themselves suddenly eating the dirt over which they’d been riding.” The unicorn makes a thrusting motion with his horn, showing Chin and Kono what he was really saying.

“You’re cruel, _brah_ , did you know that?”

“I don’t know what you just called me,” the unicorn says primly, already dancing away as Chin moved to start the motorcycle, “but cruelty is for mortals. I am just what I am.”

Chin nods and Kono hums under her breath as she climbs onto the motorcycle behind Chin – then the bright metal beast roars to life and, side-by-side, the three of them set off, ignoring the open stares from the humans gathered in the parking lot of the botanical garden.

 

 

VII.

_He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed._

 

The unicorn doesn’t know the name of this place – where the sea crashes violently into sharp, ragged cliffs – but he lets Chin lead them on, the unicorn himself keeping steady pace with the motorcycle.

The sun is already beginning to set when Chin is cutting off the black road and onto a dirt one, slowing down as he carefully navigates the path. Kono calls out a few words, her long and lean fingers curling and twisting in the air with ease as she smooths the way forward.

Since arriving in Hawai’i, her magic had come into its own, as if it itself had been homesick and been awakened by the land, by the ocean air and its unique scent (a not entirely pleasant scent, if the unicorn had any say – all any ocean and beach could smell like to him was salt and fish shit and the rusting metal of ships; but his was a biased opinion and so he’d kept it to himself).

The trail soon opens up to a small beach, some of it running a small length along the cliffs and crossing in front of the yawning mouth of a large cave. There’s was an ominous look to all – bared as it was in the fading orange light of the sun as it steadily disappeared beneath the horizon.

“This all gets covered during high tide,” Chin says. He glances at his watch and adds, “We have another couple of hours before the tide starts coming in – whatever we’re looking for, we need to be done by then.”

“We’ll need to be done a lot sooner than that,” Kono says, jerking her chin at the ocean, “the sun’s already set. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place and I don’t want to be wandering around in the dark. Maybe we should just come back tomorrow?”

Chin nods his head in agreement and he’s just going to say something else, when something lights them up from behind and there’s the sound of a door closing before someone calls out to them.

The unicorn had been so focused on the cave, he’d lost track of his surroundings, so the lights and the voice startle him and make him whirl around, ready for a fight. The unicorn sees no immediate enemy but a soft round man in a black uniform.

“Lieutenant Kelly?” the man calls out, head cocked to the side as if he was surprised to see Chin here. “You were the one we were getting reports about?”

Chin shares a look with Kono and glances at the unicorn, before he asks, “What reports, Pua?”

Pua lifts his eyebrows and looks pointedly at the unicorn – or at what he saw: a white stallion.

“Dispatch received a lot of calls about a white horse—” the unicorn snorts in dismay “—chasing a motorcycle, or a motorcycle chasing a white horse. A lot of people were panicking.”

“Yeah, well,” Chin says, obviously trying to stall for time, as he searched around for a plausible lie to tell.

Kono steps in smoothly. “It’s my horse, officer,” she says to Pua, smiling sweetly, “he got loose from his stable the night before last and I’d just found him over by the botanical garden on Vineyard. My cousin and I just thought that maybe he needed himself a good run, you know?  Then we could get him back home.”

“You don’t even have a halter or a lead or anything on him,” Pua says, looking dubious. “How were you going to get him home? And where is home?”

“Hey, _braddah_ , c’mon,” Chin says lightly, “what’s with the interrogation, huh?”

“He’s really very docile,” Kono says, placing one hand on the unicorn’s neck and scratching under his chin and the beard that grew there with the other, not that Pua would have been able to see the beard.

If her nails didn’t feel so good, the unicorn would definitely have started to argue with her. He was _not_ docile. He was _not_ friendly. He was a _unicorn_ and these mortals were— but then his eyes had slipped closed and he found himself chuffing softly as he leaned his head into Kono, careful not to touch his horn to her.

Then, before anything could be said, the earth began to shake.

 

The unicorn trembles as he stares at the sickly red light brightening within the cave.

“What fresh hell is this?” Kono asks, her fist tightening in the unicorn’s mane.

“Pua,” Chin says, whirling on the officer, “evacuate the area; a two-mile radius.”

“But, Lieutenant—”

“ _Just go_ ,” Chin shouts, putting his hands on Pua’s shoulders and nudging him back towards his car. Pua had driven up to their spot by the opposite stretch of the beach, coming in with his police cruiser from a further way on down than where Chin’s trail had ended.

“Two miles,” Kono repeats, struggling to keep her legs beneath as the shaking of earth beneath her feet intensified, “do you think that’s far enough?”

“Not by a long shot,” Chin says, “but if that’s the Red Bull – he’s only coming out because he knows there’s a unicorn here. He shouldn’t be going much further than where the unicorn himself is.”

Kono looks over at him, and Chin looks right back at her.

“He’s coming for a unicorn,” Chin says suddenly, his voice a whisper, almost drowned out on the crashing of the disturbed waves, “how about we don’t give him one?”

Before Kono can tell Chin that she doesn’t have that kind of power, much less what the unicorn would think about such a plan, the Red Bull himself tears out of the cave and starts running straight towards the unicorn.

The unicorn rears, his horn glowing, ready for battle. But then fear instinctually overtakes him – the size of the Bull was great, and his roar was deafening – and it makes the unicorn turn and run before he can truly process his actions.

And before she can even think about what she’s doing – Kono lifts her hands and cries out words she doesn’t fully understand, her magic swelling within her.

 

 

VIII.

_The girl began to touch her face timidly, recoiling from the feel of her own features. Her curled fingers brushed the mark on her forehead, and she closed her eyes and gave a thin, stabbing howl of loss and weariness and utter despair._

 

When he comes to, all the unicorn knows is the silence that surrounds him and the full darkness of night that’d settled over the beach while he’d been unconscious. Slowly, he tries to stand, but his body is wrong, and his limbs don’t seem to be working the way they ought to be. Then he looks down at himself – and, in the sand, he sees hands, grotesque _human_ hands, curled in wet mud.

He registers the distant sound of waves crashing, methodic and slow and not at all like they had been in their earlier turmoil, and then the nearer sound of someone weeping.

“What have you done?” he asks, though he’s not sure who he’s talking to – because he’s going to lift his foreleg and the human hand is what’s moving. He whirls around and that’s when he sees Kono sitting beside him, her head in her hands and her hair falling wild around her as she cries.

“I’m sorry,” she says, over and over and over, rocking herself gently as her hands move from face to wrap around her shoulders first and then down to her middle and then back up again. “I’m sorry, unicorn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He wants to trample her, wants to impale her on her horn, wants to—

“ _What have you done to me?_ ” he shouts. He looks down at himself – he doesn’t recognize his nakedness, all he sees and all he feels is the rotting and dying human body he now inhabits. His immortal-self has been stripped away, and though his magic still hums beneath his skin, it seems distant and just beyond his reach.

Chin is running up to them and he’s got a blanket, something bright and silvery, as he skids to a stop and falls to his knees before he’s throwing it over the unicorn’s (human) shoulders.

“She saved you,” he says, his voice low and he can’t quite bring himself to meet the unicorn’s eyes as he tucks the blanket around the unicorn, so, so careful not to touch the unicorn’s skin. “Please don’t get mad at her. She saved you from the Bull. Please—”

The unicorn shoves him away, hard, hard enough to push Chin onto his ass as the unicorn forces himself onto his two shaking legs, stumbling around like a foal just minutes new. The unicorn drops the blanket away, his hands running over his face and coming to a stop at his forehead.

There’s a raised scar there – where his horn is supposed to be – and the unicorn lets himself fall to his new knees and he puts his forehead down against the back of his forearms and he screams into the sand. And, gods, it’s such a _human_ sound – and it frightens the unicorn more than the Red Bull had, more than the thought of being the only of his kind left in the world. And when there’s nothing left in his lungs to scream out, he slowly lifts his head and he looks at Kono, waits until she meets his eyes.

“The next time you think of saving me,” the unicorn snarls, “ _don’t_.”

Slowly, Chin approaches the unicorn, he’s holding the blanket again.

“Please, unicorn,” he says, his voice soft. “We need to get you somewhere safe. Please, come with us.”

The unicorn touches the scar on his forehead, then he slumps in on himself and nods. He stands and this time he’s steadier, standing almost placidly as Chin once more tucks the shiny blanket around him. Then Chin moves away from the unicorn and over to Kono, and in soft, gentle words, coaxes her to her feet, too.

The unicorn doesn’t look at her, just lets himself be led away from the water’s edge, and towards the end of the path to where Chin’s motorcycle waited.

 

 

IX.

 _“Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before?” [Schmendrick’s] voice was kind and drunken ... “The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him – though in another kind of story, it’s more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he’s not a real hero. It’s a great relief to find out about Prince L_ _ír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”_

 

 “I don’t know much about mortal things,” the unicorn says, his voice rough, “but even I know this can’t fit all three of us.”

“It can’t,” Chin admits as he grabs the motorcycle by the handlebars and begins walking it back up the path, the unicorn following immediately behind; Kono followed, too, but at a much greater distance, until she was almost lost to the dark. When they’re at the top of the path, just at the edge of the black road and they’re illuminated by the sickly orange glow of a street lamp, Chin adds, “I called for some backup. He’s a friend, I promise. He’s smart and he’ll be willing to help, and he’s got the resources to do so, too.”

The unicorn aches to say that he’s had himself enough friends to last him a thousand years and more – but all the words do is remind him that his body is mortal, now, and a thousand years don’t mean what they used to mean had he’d still been a _goddamned unicorn_. So, in the end, he says nothing at all.

The minutes pass by and each of them weigh heavier on the unicorn’s skin than the one before it, until Chin finally straightens and says, “Here he is.”

The truck is large and looks black in the darkness of the night, though when it comes to a stop beneath the street light, the orange glow made it seem brown, almost green. The man who climbs out is tall and his eyes are piercing and steady – or would be, if the unicorn was inclined to notice such things.

“Steve,” Chin says, curling his hand around the back of his own neck and looking down and away from the other man, visibly trying not to flinch when the man, Steve, puts a hand on Chin’s shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry to call you out here – I know you hate this place—"

“It’s alright, Chin, really” Steve cuts in. “What’s going on, man? Are you okay?” And then his eyes are sweeping over Kono, still hovering at the edge, her shape only barely discernable in the dark. “Hey, Kono,” he says, his voice soft, “hey, _sista_ , long time no see. Are you guys okay? Were you caught up in that earthquake?” And Kono turns away from him, still brushing tears from her eyes as she glances at the unicorn – and Steve follows her eyes and when he sees the unicorn—he stops.

He just stops dead.

He stares at the unicorn, and the unicorn can’t be bothered to hold his stare – he just shifts his gaze from Steve to the large vehicle behind him, looking it over. Looking at the truck reminds him of the truck that pulled the trailers of _Wo Fat’s Carnival_ and the irony hits hard enough to startle a dry and unamused chuckle from his chest – he’d been imprisoned then, and he was imprisoned now. If the harpy could see him now, the unicorn wonders what she’d say – or if she’d just be merciful and kill him where he stood.

“This is, uh,” Chin fumbles, clearly disturbed by the unicorn’s noise of amusement, “this is Danny. Danny Williams. He came back with Kono from the mainland.”

Chin’s voice seems to break Steve from his reverie, and he gestures between Kono and the unicorn. “Oh, are you two—” and he leaves the sentence hanging.

 The unicorn doesn’t understand what Steve’s trying to ask, so he ignores the question.

“No,” Kono says, filling in the suddenly awkward silence. “Danny’s just never been out to Hawai’i before, so I told him I’d show him around. He, uh, he had come out to the beach before us and we got here just as he’d gotten himself caught up in the waves during the earthquake and he, uh, lost his swim trunks when the waves got rough. Chin had a space blanket in the bike from the thing with the bomb.”

Steve nods as though that somehow makes sense. “This is a pretty secluded beach, man,” Steve says, looking around him, hands on his hips before he looks back at the unicorn. “How’d you even get out here?”

The unicorn levels a bland look at Steve, before turning towards Chin. “I thought you said he was smart?” The unicorn doesn’t know why, but his words startle a laugh out of Chin – but it’s quickly covered with a cough.

“He is smart, Danny,” he says, “and more importantly – he’s got a truck. You’ll have to ride with him to get back to Honolulu—”

“And what the fuck did I say about the city—” the unicorn snaps, feeling his anger rising. He was tired and he was scared and he was dying and the last thing, the very last thing, he wanted was to find himself back in civilization – surrounded by all of that mortality and noise.

“What’s wrong with Honolulu?” Steve asks, holding his arms out to the side.

“Who was talking to you?” the unicorn snaps, his eyes flashing as turns his glare onto Steve.

Steve physically recoils, takes a step back and everything, throwing his hands up in a _hold up_ gesture the unicorn recognizes from when the Hesse brothers were arguing with each other. For a long moment, the unicorn stares Steve down.

“Danny, _please_ ,” Chin’s voice is soft beside him. “Please, just go with Steve for now. He’ll be following me, okay? You’ll see me the whole time.”

“Fine,” the unicorn says, re-adjusting his grip on his blanket.

“Hey, uh,” Chin interjects awkwardly, before he nods a little at the material scrunched in Danny’s hands, “we’re going to have to stop somewhere. Get you some clothes.”

“He doesn’t have clothes?” Steve asks.

“Airplane lost his luggage,” Chin says, this lie coming smoothly, though it chafes against the unicorn’s ears for a reason he doesn’t understand – maybe for its complete lack of believability.

“Alright,” Steve says, moving one of his hands to run through his hair as he nods and the unicorn _watches_ as the man comes up with a plan as if he were strategizing for war. There was a part of Steve, though, that didn’t look like he was buying much of what Chin and Kono were trying to sell but had opted to give them the benefit of the doubt instead of pushing his questions. “Look, why don’t you go ahead and head home. We can swing by my place since it’s on the way, he can borrow some of my clothes. I know it’s late, but I’ll can still take him to the store. Afterwards I’ll drop him at yours, _key den_?”

“ _Mahalo_ , Steve,” Chin says with a grateful nod. “I can pay you back whatever you spend.”

Danny looks between them, his head cocked to the side. He had no idea what had just been said – didn’t even know where to start. He spoke the languages of foxes and birds and butterflies – but whatever those last few words were that were shared between Steve and Chin, the unicorn did not know them.

Chin is slowly ushering Danny to the side of the truck, wordlessly showing him how to open the door and how to climb in and Danny watches as Steve belts himself in and somehow knows that he’ll be expected to do the same.

Then, in a hushed voice, Chin says, “Maybe Kono should go with you? To explain—”

Danny doesn’t spare Kono a glance as he gracefully climbs into the truck, readjusting the blanket so it just covers his hips, and says, “Keep the witch.”

 

 

X.

 _[Prince L_ _ír’s] smile wriggled at their feet like a hopeful puppy, but his eyes … rested quietly on the eyes of the Lady Amalthea. She looked back at him, silent as a jewel, seeing him no more truly than men see unicorns._

 

The drive is exasperating because, while he knows _nothing_ about driving, Danny knows that _this is not how it’s done_.

“You are a buffoon, boy,” Danny yells, having long since abandoned clutching at the blanket Chin had given him, and instead opting to grip onto whatever surface was available. And this must be expected behavior, because there was a conveniently placed handle just above the window that the unicorn was making full use of.

Steve, to his credit or not, Danny’s not sure about either, just grins wide and, impossibly, makes a harder left turn than should be necessary.

The unicorn thinks about the times when he himself has felt particularly happy – when the sun shone just a little bit brighter, when the birds sang just a little bit louder, when the wind tasted just a little bit sweeter – and it all drove him to prance through his forest, tossing his head and neighing and bucking for no other reason than _happiness_. Maybe, he thinks, because humans can’t prance nor buck, they have no other means to express their happiness, so they instead made their vehicles prance and buck.

“You clearly need to live a little,” Steve is saying, “you’re wound too tight, _brah_.”

“I assure you that I have lived far more than you,” Danny snaps, “and I still have no idea what you’re calling me. What is _brah_? My name is Dann— _oh, shit_.”

Steve has just brought the vehicle to a screeching halt in front of what must be his dwelling. He turns thoughtfully towards Danny, even as he begins to unbuckle himself.

“Dann-oh,” he says, nodding as if he’s come to some sort of decision, “I like that. I’m going to call you that. Danno.”

“But—”

“C’mon, Danno,” Steve calls, climbing out of his truck. “Don’t forget your space blanket.”

Danny wants to roll his eyes, but he’s a _unicorn_ and that’s _beneath him_ and he doesn’t think about how he’s glad Steve reminded him to grab the blanket. Carefully, because Danny’s not sure if he’s going to remember how to use these human legs, Danny gets out of the truck, adjusting the blanket as he goes, securing it around his waist instead of his shoulders.

He’s closing the door to the truck when he catches his reflection as a security light in front of the house switches on and lights both Danny and the truck – and Danny catches sight of the raised bit of skin on his forehead and all at once his melancholy slams back into him. He watches his reflected-self raise a hand, feels the skin he sees now is shaped like a starburst.

And it’s like the Red Bull himself was goring him as something reaches deep into his chest, curls gnarled fingers around his heart and _squeezes_. If he was truly mortal, like Kono, like Chin, like Steve, he thinks this is the part where he’d be shedding tears. But he is mortal _enough_ – he’s a unicorn without a horn, without hooves, and all he can do is stare at his damnable human reflection, his breaths coming quicker and quicker as he rubs harder and harder at—

“ _Danny_ ,” Steve is there, suddenly, his face filling Danny’s vision as he takes up Danny’s space – his hands wrapped tight, too tight, around Danny’s wrists and he’s pushing Danny back against the side of the truck, and they’re struggling and—

 _How dare he touch him_.

Danny roars, he thinks – he certainly makes some kind of sound as he shoves back hard against Steve, pushes and flips and hooks an ankle around Steve’s knee, bringing Steve’s leg out from under him until it’s Steve who’s backed against the truck, looking up and up at Danny.

“Easy, easy,” Steve is shouting and he’s holding up his hands, glancing at Danny’s clenched fists, “Danny, take it easy.”

And Danny’s trying to listen to what Steve’s saying while he’s also trying to catch his breath – and that’s when he feels something wet trickle down the outside of his nose. It startles him, the sensation, and makes him stagger backwards.

Danny looks up, checks his reflection – he’d been scratching at the raised starburst, and he’d drawn blood.

“It’s okay,” Steve says, standing and once again filling Danny’s vision, “hey, c’mon. Let’s get you inside.”

Steve places a gentle hand on Danny’s forearm. Danny flinches and shudders and jerks away from the touch and Steve immediately pulls back, lifts his hands up. Steve manages to herd him into the house without touching him again, so Danny counts it as a win and– god the home was _small_ and there was no sky and Danny immediately itched to be free of it. To his mind, this place was no bigger than the trailer Wo Fat had kept him caged in.

Steve turns on the lights and disappears into the depths of the house and up a flight of a stairs. He’s back just as quickly as he’d gone – reappearing with a shirt and shorts and a box. He hands the first two items to Danny and shows him to what he calls a bathroom and says, “You can change in here, then we’ll see to that cut on your forehead, okay?”

Steve waits until the unicorn nods at him before he sets the box down on the counter, and disappears once more, closing the door behind him, telling Danny to call him when he’s finished.

Danny stares at the closed door for a moment before he drops the blanket from around his waist and picks up the clothing. It takes a little finagling, but Danny remembers how the humans around him worn their own clothes and puts the shorts and the shirt on accordingly.

He steps out of the bathroom and Steve runs his eyes quickly over him, as if checking to make sure he’d done it right, or maybe to check that Danny hadn’t injured himself further.

“Alright, good,” he says, then he’s leading Danny back into the bathroom and tells him to sit on the toilet.

Danny looks around and sits on what Steve had made a gesture at, a shiny seat of porcelain.

“Alright,” Steve says, again, as he opens the box. Then he turns back to Danny, says, “Alright, I’m going to have to touch you. Is that okay?”

Danny snorts and looks away from Steve but nods his head anyway. The blood was getting tacky and sticky against his skin and he wanted it gone. He watches as Steve goes through the box, pulling out various items before he turns and washes his hands. The sudden flow of water makes Danny cock his head to the side.

“Never seen a sink before, Danno?” Steve asks, but he’s teasing, his voice light. If his eyes had been on Danny, he’d have seen Danny lift his eyebrows.

Steve then dries his hands on a cloth before he sets about cleaning the cuts on Danny’s forehead.

“Head wounds always bleed a lot,” Steve says softly, though Danny’s not entirely sure if he’s talking to Danny or to himself, so Danny doesn’t answer. “You won’t need bandages or stitches,” he says, still in that low voice. “I’m just going to clean it up, put a liquid bandage on – that’ll keep out any germs and stop it from getting infected.”

Danny sighs and closes his eyes as he lets the human tend to him.

Steve’s touch is gentle, barely there against his skin. Then it’s gone and Danny wonders at the sudden cold that fills him, but then that feeling itself is gone as Danny leans away from it.

“All done,” Steve says, stepping back and once more washing his hands in the sink.

 

 

XI.

_[Mabruk’s] eyes met King Haggard’s hungry eyes, and he laughed like a goat._

_“Haggard, I would not be you for all the world,” he declared. “You have let your doom in by the front door, though it will not depart that way.”_

 

“Steve?” calls a voice. “Steve, you here?”

Steve turns away from Danny, pokes his head out of the bathroom door, and calls back, “Hey, dad, in here. Hang on a sec.” Then Steve is turning back to Danny, says, “C’mon, meet my dad.”

Danny knew that humans kept their families close, just as many other creatures do, so why the appearance of Steve’s father set Danny’s teeth to edge, he couldn’t tell right away. Still, he lets Steve lead him out of the bathroom and out back into the room which they had first entered by the front door.

The man waiting for them there is shorter than Steve, and graying, and his eyes were hard even as they lit on his own son. But, as they slid past Steve to Danny – they widened almost comically – and Danny knew that this man recognized him, or maybe thought to.

Steve doesn’t seem to notice, jerking a thumb behind him to indicate Danny to his dad as he says, “Dad, this is Danny Williams. He’s from the mainland,” then he’s turning to Danny and he’s nodding his head to his dad and says, “Danny, this is John McGarrett.”

And all at once Danny feels as if the floor has given way beneath him – he feels as if time slows and he’s flying over all of this, watching from above as he stands in a human body adorned with human clothes and suffering through human formalities when all he wants to do is run away from it all and, unlike the Red Bull, Danny knew that neither McGarrett would have had a prayer of catching him.

“Nice to meet you,” John McGarrett is saying, though his voice is as distant as a crow’s caw that’s miles off.

Danny’s human body moves of its own accord and takes a step backwards, putting Steve more firmly between himself and John. He says nothing. He sees John make some kind of aborted movement with his hand, as if he’d been reaching for Danny – but Steve catches it and waves it off with some look that must mean something between father and son.

 _Father and son_.

“Oh,” Danny says, looking hard at Steve. “ _Oh_.”

Steve turns to him, a puzzled look on his face that Danny has no time to decipher – Chin had called this man friend, had told Danny to go with him. The son of the man who’d sent the Red Bull after Danny’s own kind to steal them all from their forests.

“ _Friend_ , indeed,” Danny says, putting his hands into the pockets of the shorts as he looks down at the floor – his bare human feet flexing against the hardwood.

Then he looks back up at Steve, forces himself to _really_ look at Steve – look at him and through him and then beyond; he looks at Steve the way he’d looked at Kono the first time they’d met at Wo Fat’s little carnival. And damn Steve and damn Danny – there was no deception here, not on Steve’s part. He may be the son of this mad man, but he had neither knowledge of the lost unicorns nor care of it. And Danny figures that must be worth something.

“Do you know me?” John asks, cocking his head to the side, drawing Danny’s attention as he looks at Danny much the way a vulture does as she waits for a thing to die.

Again, Danny doesn’t answer him. He has no words, nothing to say, to John McGarrett. Not in front of Steve.

“You seem familiar,” John presses, taking a step towards Danny.

Danny stays silent. He doesn’t even look at John – keeping his eyes only on Steve, who was beginning to look nervous and agitated, his eyes darting back and forth between his father and Danny.

Finally, Steve hisses out, “ _Danny_.”

Danny doesn’t even blink, “Yeah, Steve?”

John huffs and draws himself up, advancing quickly on Danny, his voice growing into a thunder as he says, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

And Danny can no longer hold onto the charade as he snaps, “ _Don’t you know?_ ” And his eyes flash and he steps forward to meet John – but before he can grab him, Steve is there and he’s standing between them, pushing his own father back with one hand as he grabs Danny by the shirt with the other, hauling him towards the door.

 

 

XII.

_“… I will look at them for a while. A pleasant air of disaster attends them. Perhaps that is what I want.”_

 

“What the hell was that all about, Danno?” Steve yells as soon as he’s got the truck going and the both of them are buckled.

Danny snaps, “Take me to Chin. He and I need to talk about his choice of _friends_.” Danny spits that last word with a venom that makes Steve glance over at him.

“I think you’re tired,” Steve says, his voice soft. “It’s late and it seems like you’re not have a great day. Look, I’ll take you back to Chin, but why don’t you get some rest? Tomorrow, I’m going to come back and talk to you because I’d really like to know what you have against my dad.”

And because Danny had looked into Steve’s heart, had read his soul, he says, “You hold no more feeling for your father than I do – let’s not pretend here.”

Steve’s head whips around and he glares hard at the side of Danny’s head. Chin had once called Danny cruel and Danny wonders now if this was another example of his supposed cruelty. Danny didn’t care much either way.

Seeing John McGarrett had reminded Danny of his purpose here – something Danny thinks he may have started to forget the longer he was in Steve’s presence, the more Steve touched and talked and gentled him. It was, god, it was disconcerting – to think he’d been so easily distracted.

Or perhaps Danny was being too hard on himself.

Because Steve was right – Danny was _not_ having a great day. Just hours ago, he’d been an immortal creature – and the greatest amongst them all, a _unicorn_ – but after Kono’s little bout of magic he’d awoken mortal and human. He was the last of his kind. The Red Bull and John McGarrett, Steve’s own father, had seen to that. So, _no_ , Danny was not having a _great day_.

The unicorn leans back into his seat and closes his eyes against the street lamps that light the road. He lets his head loll to the side, and he opens his eyes again, watching the scenery roll steadily on by – for whatever reason, Steve wasn’t driving as erratically as he had the first time Danny was in the car. Danny takes what little comfort he can in that.

 

They pull up to what Danny can only assume is Chin’s dwelling and as Danny and Steve are getting out of the truck, Chin and Kono come out of the house.

Danny doesn’t let any of the other humans speak, before he’s ducking in close to Chin, making sure he’s holding Chin’s gaze, and he says, “I met John McGarrett.”

Chin’s breath hitches and there’s true surprise in his eyes – making Danny’s immediate feelings of betrayal wash away in the wake of that look.

“Danno,” Steve’s voice is soft, and it draws Danny’s eyes away from Chin’s, _makes_ Danny look at Steve. “Remember what I said; get some rest.”

Danny wants to tell Steve what he thinks of a mortal trying to tell him what to do. But he doesn’t. And instead he pushes his way past Chin, not even bothering to look at Kono and definitely making sure he doesn’t even so much as accidentally get _close_ to her as he goes into the house. He picks the softest looking piece of furniture, the couch, and lays down – throwing an arm over his eyes, shifting his arm when it brushes against the raised starburst on his forehead and the cuts around it.

The mortals stay outside and talk to each other in low voices; the unicorn could listen if he chose, but instead he closes his hearing and focuses instead on slowing his breathing.

 

It is not in a unicorn’s nature do things quickly – but Danny is an exception, he always has been, and the mortality he feels now does nothing to temper his impatience. This new body was not long for this world, not by the standards of a unicorn, so Danny was anxious to find the rest of his kind and return them to the world so he himself could be returned to his proper shape before heading back to his forest.

But come the next morning, Chin wakes him with news.

Chin says, “John McGarrett’s left the island. Steve says he should be back in a couple weeks – but until then,” he’d shrugged then, “there’s really nothing we can do.”

Not long after that, Steve is at Chin’s door.

His voice is soft as he takes Danny in and says, “We never did go and get you those new clothes.”

Danny glances at Chin, but all Chin does is make a motion that Danny translates as _Your call_. So Danny decides that, since there was nothing better to do, and that he’d be spending more time on the island than he had initially planned for, he might as well prepare to do so comfortably and in his own clothes. Danny pointedly doesn’t think about the niggling sense of relief he’d felt at the thought of spending more time with Steve.

They load up into Steve’s truck – Danny taking the passenger seat and Chin taking the back – and Chin’s house isn’t even out of sight before Steve and Danny begin arguing. Steve had simply asked what Danny had thought of Hawai’i so far and Danny had responded that he’d hated it – and Steve had felt compelled to defend his home, extolling its many virtues and Danny cutting them each down with quick and biting quips that left Chin laughing silently in the backseat.

Just in the space of that early morning conversation, Danny realized that Steve was fast becoming another problem that Danny was going to need to outrun, and quickly, because Steve was making Danny forget his problems.

Steve was not a beautiful creature in Danny’s eyes – but he was intriguing in that he not only caught Danny’s attention, but he held it, a noteworthy feat in and of itself. Noteworthy, and exasperating. Steve riled Danny in ways Danny himself could not account for. Steve angered him and Danny yelled, and Steve yelled back and then that was usually the end of it – later, Danny realizes that not once had he (seriously) considered hurting Steve, not since that first day and their struggle against Steve’s truck.

 

XIII.

_“When you are old, anything that does not disturb you is a comfort.”_

 

That first shopping trip is an event in and of itself. Danny spends half an hour looking at the assorted items in front of him – all of which were brightly colored and bore bold prints of flowers and boats and palm trees that offends Danny’s eyes.

“What do you normally wear?” Steve asks, not even sounding remotely frustrated as the length of time this was taking.

Danny opens his mouth to say, “Nothing” but Chin quickly talks over him.

“He’s boring,” Chin says, rolling his eyes with overt irritation, “Kono tells me he wore nothing but business clothes. Like button up shirts and slacks, just, all the time. She was hoping she could get him to at least _try_ something new.”

“Well, I don’t want to try something new,” Danny says, going along with this game. Because whatever those clothing items were that Chin had just mentioned, they were making Steve’s face contort into a myriad of horrible expressions that were making Danny grin. Danny turns to Chin and he’s still grinning, “Take me to the button-ups. I want them.”

 

They go to three different stores after that, but each time Danny would walk in and, after taking one long look around, would walk right back out, dragging the mortals out with a soft grip on each of their arms.

The fourth store, though, makes Danny hum with contentment – there were very few bold colors in the store, which Danny loved instantly. He makes his way to a display of shirts that were different shades of whites and light greys – his eyes drawing to one particular shade that, while not an exact match, was as close as humans could probably ever get to matching the color of a unicorn’s coat.

Chin comes up next to him and starts flicking through the shirts before pulling one out from the stack and handing it over.

“Try this on first,” he says, motioning to a salesman, who was approaching them slowly and with a little bit of disdain, “we’ll see what the fit’s like before we start picking out stuff you’ll like.”

The salesman, _Clark_ his nametag reads, arrives then, a tight smile on his lips a he looks Chin and Steve up and down. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

“Yeah,” Chin says, already putting on his most winning and charming smile, trying to head off the smarminess before it could really get started, as he jerks his chin at Danny. “I’ve been dragging my friend here all over the island and nothing’s been to his taste. Think you can help us?”

Clark glances over at Danny and runs a critical eye over him – and the more he looks at Danny, the softer his eyes become.

Even as a human, Danny had retained some of his Otherness. It could make him pass through the crowds unnoticed or, when looked at directly, it could command sole attention until you weren’t sure how you could have looked him by. It could fill you will sorrow, or with joy – it all depended on the one looking and what was in their heart.

And Clark’s heart, Danny could see, was hard – hard from work, from life, from the cruelness of people that’s he’s not only accepted but then embraced and emulated – so when Clark looks long and hard at Danny, Clark’s judgement is reflected back at him ten-fold.

“I think we can handle it ourselves,” Danny says, turning away from Clark – a dismissal. He catches Steve’s eye then, who had silently plopped himself down on a couch that sat in the middle of the store as soon as he’d seen Danny accept this place and had been busying himself with his phone, only looking up when Clark had approached them, and Steve’s watching him curiously.

Danny lifts an eyebrow in question. _What_? Danny asks without asking.

Steve shrugs his shoulders and gives a small shake of his head before he turns away. _Nothing_ , Steve answers without answering.

Danny stares at Steve a moment longer – wondering what it might mean for Danny’s mortality that he’s starting to have conversations with the humans without so much as actually speaking with them – before he turns back to the display.

Chin’s watching him and Steve, a playful smirk on his lips.

Danny makes it a point to say out loud, “Shut up, Chin.”

Chin simply raises his hands before he begins moving Danny towards a changing room. “Just try the shirt on, Danny,” he says.

The shirt fits fine, but it doesn’t stop Chin from cocking his head to the side and shaking his head, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he hands Danny another size of the same shirt and a pair of charcoal-grey slacks.

“Try these.”

Danny does. This shirt is a tighter fit and not as uncomfortable as Danny had thought it’d be. When he steps out of the dressing room, Chin claps his hands together once and grins, then he’s whirling around and snapping his fingers in Steve’s face to get his attention.

“Hey, Steve,” snap, snap of Chin’s fingers, “what do you think? He might look like a _haole_ , but he’s one of the better-looking ones, right?”

Steve briefly looks annoyed at being interrupted from whatever he’d been reading, but then he’s looking over at Danny and his eyebrows shoot up and his jaw drops a little. Then he’s sitting up from where he’d slumped down on the couch as he clears his throat and nods and Danny can’t help but notice that Steve’s eyes keep tracing over the line of his chest, his arms – as if he hadn’t already seen what Danny looked like (and probably a little more besides during their impromptu match against the side of Steve’s truck) outside of these clothes.

Humans were weird.

Danny leaves the shop with two pairs of pants, a pair of loafers, and a variety of shirts, some plain and some pin-striped, that ranged the spectrum of whites and greys, as well as two that were dark blue that Chin had been strangely insistent on and had made Steve make a face that looked like he was about to have some kind of medical emergency.

 

XIV.

_“I wish you wanted something of me. It wouldn’t have to be a valiant deed – just useful.”_

 

Danny has been human for two weeks now and this was fifth time Steve had taken him out of Chin’s home. Steve picks him up and takes him out to eat and shop; Chin had accompanied them in the beginning, quietly explaining things whenever Steve’s back was turned.

Steve had tried to invite Kono out with them once, but she had shrunk in on herself, said that she was in the middle of researching something and that it needed all of her attention; if Steve notices the tension between Kono and Danny, he doesn’t comment on it.

During their outings – Chin calls them _dates_ , but he’s got a wry smirk to his lips as he says it and, after explaining what a date is, Danny’s not sure if Chin had been joking or not, nor does he know which he’d prefer – but, anyway, during their outings or dates or not-dates, they talk about everything and nothing: about the weather and food (so much food) and the recent earthquakes (which Danny knows are from the Red Bull, coming up from his lava tube cavern to search for the unicorn that eluded him); they talk about Danny’s fashion sense and why couldn’t be persuaded to dress more casually and his aversion to the ocean.

On that latter topic, Danny shuts down the conversation abruptly.

He doesn’t know how to explain it and it aggravates him and makes him rub at that raised starburst on his forehead. There was something about the water that called to him – as if there was something he was looking for down there; but there was a part of him, a part of him that he thinks he’s starting to forget sometimes, that screams at him not to get too close to the water’s edge, lest something come up behind him and stop him from ever coming out again.

“It’s okay, Danno,” Steve had said, reaching across the table, over the platter of shrimp they were sharing, and tugging on the cuff of Danny’s rolled-up shirtsleeve, pulls Danny’s hand away from where he’d been rubbing at the starburst. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Danny had snorted then, and said, his tone going for offended or exasperated and only coming out as thankful, “Of course I don’t.”

 

Danny hadn’t known what Steve did with his time when he’s not with Danny until Danny’s sitting at the table in the dining room of Chin’s house, eating, and Kono’s got the television on and the news anchor says Steve’s name.

Danny whips his head around and he’s up from his seat and in the living room, his mouth still full of toast.

“What is this?” he asks Kono.

She startles a little at his voice, though Danny isn’t sure why, but she answers. “Steve and Five-0 took down a drug cartel,” she says.

Danny wants to ask questions, but he decides to wait, to ask Steve directly the next time he sees him. Then he looks over to Kono and he smiles at her and it makes her eyes widen in shock. He cocks his head to the side in confusion, trying to remember if he’d been mad at her for something – but he can’t remember what it was. So, he smiles at her again and returns to his plate of food in the kitchen.

Later that night, just as he’s drifting off to sleep, he hears Kono talking rapidly to Chin, and he doesn’t hear all she has to say, but he hears “he’s forgetting” and “it’ll all be a dream to him soon” – and Danny wonders who they’re talking about, who Kono is so concerned for, but then he’s slipping off into unconsciousness.

 

Danny learns that Steve had once been part of the nation’s military and was highly trained, but he’d been transferred to the reserves and put in charge of special task force, Five-0, under the command of Hawai’i’s governor, in order to investigate a variety of criminal activity that happened around the state; most importantly for Steve though, Five-0 gave him the resources to look into the death of his sister – something that had happened just the year before.

“Maybe you could use a fresh pair of eyes,” Danny had said, not looking at Steve, but instead looking out over the ocean waves, his feet hanging loose over the side of the little wall he was perched on.

They had been driving by this spot when Danny had yelled at Steve to stop the truck – that he’d wanted to get out and look. It was so close to where Kono’s magic had changed Danny from unicorn to human, but with Steve at his side, the pain and sadness and hurt of the memory hadn’t seemed to sting as much.

“You offering?” Steve asks. He swings his head to look at Danny and he’s sitting so close – and Danny’s not sure how he missed that, how he had let Steve slip in past his defenses and into his personal space – so close that Danny can see the different shades of blue and green in Steve’s eyes.

Danny doesn’t lean away, doesn’t even think to, just nods at Steve and says, “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

 

Steve takes Danny to Iolani Palace and leads him up to the offices. At the Palace, Danny meets three new humans named Catherine, Lou, and Jerry – they make up the rest of Steve’s herd of investigators and detectives. Of them, Danny takes an instant shining to Jerry.

Jerry takes one look at Danny, his eyes lingering at the raised starburst on Danny’s forehead, and then he’s running up to Danny and he’s talking a mile-a-minute – the words coming so fast that Danny can barely understand. Not that Danny needs to – there’s a sureness and a purity radiating out of Jerry, and it makes a soft grin spread across Danny’s face without Danny himself having any say in the matter.

Jerry is just starting to stumble over his words in his nervousness and breathlessness, and Danny can’t help but reach out.

“Take a breath,” the unicorn says, touching his hand to the human’s forearm.

There’s a movement that Danny catches out of the corner of his eye and he glances and sees Steve leaning back against a table, his arms folded over his chest and a look of utter fondness on his face that makes Danny quickly look back to Jerry.

“Please excuse me, Jerry,” Danny says, giving Jerry’s arm a soft squeeze before dropping his hand. “I’m here to help Steve with something.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” Jerry says, clapping his hands together and stepping away and to the side, though he hadn’t at all been blocking Danny’s way to Steve, “go do whatever you’re gonna do. Sorry. Um, yeah. Sorry.”

“Jerry,” Danny says, a light admonishment in his tone as he raises a hand to wag a finger at Jerry, “don’t apologize. If you were bothering me, I would have told you.”

Jerry nods his head and he’s opening his mouth, Danny thinks to apologize again – so he raises that finger again and lifts his eyebrows in conjunction with the motion, until Jerry’s mouth snaps closed, and he smiles once more and nods again.

 

“Who would’ve known you were such a softie,” Steve teases once they’re in Steve’s office and the door has closed behind them.

“I’m soft with those who know me, babe,” Danny says, then waves a dismissive hand at Steve’s confused look. Sobering, Danny gestures to Steve’s desk. “Show me the file on your sister’s case.”

Instantly, the levity is gone from the room.

Steve reaches into the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a thick folder filled with papers and photographs and hands it all to Danny. Steve starts to explain, but Danny holds up a hand as he takes the folder with him to the couch.

“Let me just look, first,” Danny says, gentle as he knows how with Steve.

Danny takes a breath as he settles onto the couch and opens the folder.

The first thing, the very first thing, that Danny sees is the dead girl. He closes his eyes briefly against the image before he makes himself look again.

The girl is really a young woman, and she’s sprawled on a beach, blood coming from her eyes and her mouth and her nose. The shape of her body is wrong – as though parts of her had sunken in and it’s not until he gets to the coroner’s report that he understands.

The human who’d signed the report, Dr. Max Bergman, had conclude that Mary McGarrett had been trampled. The autopsy notes say that while Dr. Bergman could not conclude the exact type of animal – it was something very large and hooved, something the shape of an ox but with the size and weight of an elephant. Mary had been traveling fast on a dirt bike when the attack had occurred, when whatever it was had met her head-on and knocked her from her bike, cutting her down.

Sorrow fills Danny’s chest – this was the work of the Red Bull, of that he had no doubt.

He doesn’t know what could have possessed the Red Bull to have come for his master’s daughter. Was she with a unicorn when he began his round-up? Did she happen upon the act and unknowingly wander into its midst? Or was she the price John McGarrett had to pay in order to have the unicorns as his own? Chin had said that John McGarrett had lost his heart when he’d lost his wife – would the sacrifice of a daughter have meant anything to him if it’d meant trapping the creatures who could have helped Doris if they had been around?

Danny reads through the case once and twice more, searching for the answers to his questions in the typed ink and photographed blood. And if Danny couldn’t find answers, he could only imagine what kind of frenzy Steve had been working himself into without half of the knowledge Danny has (at least sometimes; he remembers yesterday, remembers _forgetting_ what Kono had done to him – he’s not sure why or even how he could’ve forgotten something like that and, when he’d woken up, had just assumed it was because he’d been tired).

Carefully, almost reverently, Danny closes the folder and sets it down on the couch beside him before he leans forward with a sigh, bracing his elbows on his thighs as he hangs his head.

Steve, who’d been sitting quietly at his desk, clicking around on his computer and working – though both he and Danny knew he’d only been going through the motions of working – doesn’t say anything as he closes his laptop, finished with his game of pretend. He rests an ankle on his thigh and sits back, crossing his arms over his chest, and waits for Danny to speak.

 

 

XV.

_“It may have been foolish of me to admit you, but I am not so foolish as to forbid you this door or that. My secrets guard themselves – will yours do the same?”_

 

Danny stands and moves to the chair in front of Steve’s desk. There two picture frames on Steve’s desk – one was of John and Doris McGarrett, the other of Mary and Steve and an older woman Danny doesn’t know – and it’s the second one that Danny picks up. He looks at Mary’s face, young and whole and clean, and wonders at the girl.

“I think I would have liked her,” Danny says, gently returning the picture to its place on Steve’s desk as he meets Steve’s eyes. “If she was anything like you, Steve, I think I would have liked her a lot.”

“She was as great kid,” Steve says, blinking rapidly and looking away from Danny.

Danny looks down at his hands, giving Steve a moment. And then he says, “Steve.” He waits for Steve to look up at him. “Steve, I need to talk to your father. I know he’s back on the island.”

Steve looks at Danny askew, his eyebrows furrowing. “ _You know_ ,” he repeats, and Danny can see Steve tightening his grip on the arm rests of his chair. “You never did tell me what your problem was with him.”

“When you look at me, Steve, what do you see?”

Steve scoffs and lifts his eyebrows and makes a sweeping gesture at Danny’s human form. “I see _you_ , Danno, what do you mean what do I see?”

Danny had known that there couldn’t have been any other answer, so he tries to shake away the disappointment. If Steve hadn’t recognized Danny two weeks ago, he wasn’t going to have recognized him in the past two hours.

“What do you think Jerry saw?” Danny asks, leaning forward in his chair.

Steve rolls his eyes as he stands. “Jerry is a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “He sees all kinds of things that aren’t there.” Then Steve pauses and his smile turns from mocking and defensive to sincere. “That was really nice of you back there, to indulge him like that.”

It’s Danny’s turn to roll his eyes. “You’re an idiot, babe,” he says. And he wants to say more – to tell Steve the truth and then some. But, as they were heading out of Steve’s office, Danny knew that the truth was coming up on them fast and that it’d be on Steve soon enough.

 

The drive to John McGarrett’s house is tense and silent and neither Danny nor Steve seem to know how to break it.

They pull up into the drive and get out of the truck.

“His car’s not here,” Steve says, looking around for the older vehicle that belonged to John. Not finding it, Steve pulls out his cell phone with one hand and unlocks the house with the other and enters, Danny following along behind him. Danny stands in the living room as Steve calls out to his dad – he’s met with only quiet. Into the cell phone, Steve says, “Hey, dad, I need to talk to you about something. Well, actually, it’s about Mary. Give me a call or come by the house. Bye.”

“Text Chin, please,” Danny says, his hands in the pockets of his slacks as he moves through the house and towards the back. “I’d like to speak with him, too. In person.”

Steve quirks an eyebrow but his thumbs begin tapping away at his phone. Chin had bought Danny a cell phone the week before, and Danny had taken to the thing easily enough, but he still forgot that it was a tool he had at his disposal and so would often leave it sitting, uncharged, on the kitchen table or buried between couch cushions.

Steve and Danny settle together on the pair of chairs that sit on the McGarrett’s private stretch of beach, watching the ocean together. In the distance – something jumps in the surf, but before Danny can see what it is, it’s gone.

This time, the silence between them isn’t – it’s not _comfortable_ , but it’s not _uncomfortable_ – it’s just something that is.

They listen to and watch the waves rolling in and breaking against the sand, the birds moving overhead. A butterfly flies in close to Danny and lands on his arm and Danny wishes he could hear what song she was singing.

“Do all animals like you?” Steve asks, watching the butterfly.

Danny huffs softly, sadly, and says, “Most.” He watches the butterfly for a moment longer before she flits away. Danny leans back a little more into his chair and adds, “The boars don’t.”

Steve snorts. “I doubt they like anyone.”

“You don’t know the half of it, babe,” he says, turning to Steve and letting himself grin.

Steve smiles back, his eyes wrinkled and squinted in the light of the setting sun. And Danny, looking at him then, wonders how he could ever have thought Steve wasn’t beautiful.

 

 

XVI.

_The cat pushed his head hard into Molly’s suddenly still hand. … “The Prince is very brave to love a unicorn. A cat can appreciate valiant absurdity.”_

 

Chin arrives with Kono just as the bottom of the sun has touched the line of the horizon. Danny doesn’t glare, but he shoots a purposeful _look_ at Chin that Chin ignores, instead he leans forward and whispers to Danny, “She thinks she’s found what she needs to turn you back.”

Danny startles at the words and glances at Kono, the witch offering him a small and hesitant smile in return. Danny looks away. An uneasiness was welling in his chest and without thinking, he reached out and touched a hand to Steve’s forearm – not holding onto him, but just the barest graze of his fingerpads to Steve’s skin.

Steve looks down at where Danny’s touched him, before he looks back up and into Danny’s eyes, asks, “Everything alright, Danno?”

Danny wants to answer with the truth, just as he always does when Steve asks him something directly. But before the words can slip from his tongue, John McGarrett’s voice is cutting in.

“Steve,” he snaps, “if you’re going to have a get-together, do it elsewhere.”

If he’d had his horn, Danny knows viscerally that he would’ve impaled John for his tone with Steve.

“Did you get my messages?” Steve asks.

John jiggles his keys in his hands and purses his lips, “Yes. And if I wanted to talk about Mary, boy, it wouldn’t be with you.” With that, he turns and walks briskly away, disappearing back into the house.

Danny follows him – making a gesture for the others to stay outside. To Steve he says, “Just – give me a minute, please?”

“Danno—”

“I _know_ , Steven,” Danny says, his hand falling onto Steve’s chest and giving him a gentle push back towards Chin and Kono; he ignores the heat that comes from his palm and he ignores the way Steve’s hand immediately comes up to cover Danny’s and he ignores the way he wants _more_. “Please.”

Chin appears at Steve’s side and he touches Steve’s bicep lightly, tugging at the shirtsleeve. “Trust him,” he says.

Steve’s hand tightens briefly around Danny’s and for a second, Danny’s not sure Steve will – trust him, that is – but then the moment passes and Steve steps back, dropping his hand from Danny’s.

Danny nods his head at Chin and spares one more look towards Kono, whose eyes have turned towards the ocean and the sun sitting half-way below the horizon. Then Danny turns away from them and disappears into the house.

 

John McGarrett was in the kitchen, taking a pull from a bottle of beer and leaning against the counter. His eyes immediately track Danny when Danny enters, Danny purposefully keeping a certain distance between them.

“Have you been recognized yet?” John asks, a sneer twisting his face.

Danny doesn’t answer. Instead he asks his own question. “Why did you have the Red Bull kill your daughter? Was it not enough for you to—” and then Danny ducks as John roars and hurls his still nearly full bottle of beer at Danny’s head.

“ _How dare you_ ,” John roars, and the earth below them trembles. “How _dare_ you—”

“ _Danny_ ,” Kono shouts, running into the house, “he’s coming – the Red Bull—he’s—”

Danny turns and Steve’s there and the ground is still shaking.

“These goddamned earthquakes,” Steve snaps, grabbing Danny’s hand and pulling him outside. And Danny sees it – just over Steve’s shoulder, the sickly red light of the Red Bull fast approaching.

“Steve, Steve,” Danny says, digging his heels into the sand and using every bit of strength afforded him to switch the direction of Steve’s momentum and redirect it back towards the house. “Steve, babe, I need you to listen to me – the Red Bull’s coming, okay, I need you to go inside. _Please_ , Steve—”

“Wait, wait, Danno,” Steve says, gripping Danny’s shoulders – trying to force him to just _pause_ for a second, “why are you running away from an energy drink?”

Danny blinks. “Oh my god, Steve, no, no—you big, dumb, beautiful idiot. Not _a_ red bull – _the_ Red Bull. _The_ Red Bull, Steven.”

And before Danny could say anymore – the Red Bull’s roar filled the night.

 

 

XVII.

_…and the skull shrieked, “Unicorn! Unicorn! Haggard, Haggard, there she goes down to the Red Bull!”_

 

John McGarrett fills the doorway but it’s not the blackness of his eyes that Danny’s staring down into—

“Dad, what the hell—” Steve starts—

“Shut up,” John snaps, stepping forward until the cold barrel of the rifle is pressed against the raised starburst on Danny’s forehead. “You,” he snarls, his voice low, “it’s time you joined the others in the ocean. The Red Bull is coming to collect you, unicorn. You’ll stay there and you’ll rot for the rest of—"

Then Kono’s voice fills the air and the gun is flying out of John’s hand even as John himself goes sailing backwards into the dark of the house.

“Unicorn, _run_ ,” she screams, and it’s echoing on the roar of Red Bull, coming along the beach.

And so Danny does – he runs into and then through the house and out the front door. He doesn’t know where he’ll go, he’s just following his legs as he starts onto the street – but then he’s being jerked back towards the house by Steve.

Danny tries to struggle, but then Steve’s shouting, “ _Truck_ , Danny – get in the goddamned truck.”

Danny nods stupidly at Steve as Steve jumps into the driver seat as Danny and Kono and Chin jump into the bed of the truck, Steve quickly getting the truck moving.

The Bull appears on the road, then – materializing as though summoned from the flame of a lighter.

“ _Drive_ , Steve,” Danny shouts through the back window.

“What the hell do you think I’m doing?” Steve shouts back, his voice high-pitched and thickened with his own fear.

But the truck is nothing for the Bull and he gains on them easily, pulling himself even with Steve’s truck before lowering his head and ramming it into the side of the truck – gouging the metal as easily as if it were paper. Kono stands then and she raises her hands as she shouts something that keeps the truck upright and knocks the Bull backwards, makes him stumble.

“Good job, Kono,” Danny says, though he doesn’t look at her – opting instead to keep his eyes on the Bull who was getting smaller with the distance put between them and him.

Kono preens. But she can’t do anything about what she doesn’t see – and what she doesn’t see is John McGarrett’s car gunning for them as they pass through an intersection, and t-bones into them. And this time, she can’t stop the truck from rolling – but Danny hears her whisper a quick protection spell and, even though Danny and Chin and Kono herself is thrown clear from the truck, none of them are hurt.

Danny quickly springs to his feet and rushes back to the truck, shouting, “ _Steve?!_ Steven, dammit, answer me.”

“I’m fine, Danno,” Steve answers, his hoarse voice coming from inside the truck “What the hell—”

“We need to talk about your dad, babe,” Danny snaps, using one hand to grip Steve’s shirt tight, and the other to yank on his seatbelt and pull it free.

 

 

XVIII.

_“The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”_

 

Danny is just pulling Steve out of the truck, his hands tucked under Steve’s armpits and pulling him out – the two of them talking and cursing over each other as if this were any other outing ( _date_ , Danny’s traitorous minds supplies completely inappropriately given the circumstances) – then Danny is letting Steve fall and he’s got his hands on his hips and he’s still yelling when there’s a _crack_ in the air and something hits him in the shoulder, making Danny spin and fall to the ground.

“You can’t have my son,” John McGarrett shouts, aiming with his rifle once more, the action seemingly echoed by the Red Bull suddenly at his back.

Steve yells something that Danny doesn’t hear – all he knows now is pain as he suffers the fragility of this body. He looks down at where he’s been shot in the shoulder – sees the blood, looking almost black in the early evening twilight – and he wants to scream.

He’s distantly aware that Steve’s standing over him, standing between Danny and Steve’s own dad and the Red Bull himself. The Red Bull paws at the ground, making it shake as he tears up the asphalt of the road. Sirens were wailing in the near distance, but they seemed to be moving further away.

The sudden thought of the Honolulu fire department showing up to hose down the Red Bull makes Danny giddy and laughter bubbles up and out of his throat and chest before he can even think to stop it.

Abruptly, he chokes on his own laughter. “Oh, god,” Danny says to no one – _hosing down the Red Bull_.

Danny knows what he needs to do.

Danny forces himself up to crouch, waits to make sure he hasn’t attracted any attention – Steve and John were still busy screaming at each other and the Red Bull was standing sentry at John’s back, awaiting his order – before Danny catches Kono’s eyes.

She stares at him, her head cocked to the side because she must be reading the determination on his face. They’d been through so much – the pair of them. From his initial capture as Wo Fat’s prisoner to the release of the harpy, and even that first meeting with the Bull – never mind how it’d ended, Kono hadn’t left his side and had never shown any sign that that had even been a consideration.

Danny whispers, knowing she can hear him, “Kono, I trust you.” And she’s got tears in her eyes and Danny, if he’d had the time, he’d go to her, let her fist her hands in his mane the way she’d used to. Still whispering, he smirks and says, “ _Never run from anything immortal_ ,” praying that she understands his meaning.

She’s shaking her head then – but Danny’s made up his mind as he stands up in a rush and breaks away from them, heading back the way they’d come, shouting over his shoulder, “ _Kono,_ if you can, do it _now_.”

Kono’s voice, but not her exact words, fill Danny – and he feels a heat he knows isn’t entirely from the Bull behind him wrapping him up. Then his body is contorting and twisting and Danny’s falling and tumbling and when he rights himself – he’s back on four legs.

The unicorn is filled with joy as he feels his immortality once more settle around him like a cloak, healing his bullet wound, as his senses sharpen, and the world is once more filled with noises and scents and—

—and, just behind him, somewhere over the wind and the not-too-distant ocean waves and the Bull’s hooves crashing against the pavement, there’s the sound of two gunshots and a mortal’s scream.

But the unicorn does not slow.

 

The unicorn leads the Red Bull back through the destroyed McGarrett home, passing through the wreckage with flitting and easy steps, but instead of leading the Bull directly back out onto the beach, the unicorn uses the debris of the home to get behind the Bull.

The Bull bellows and lowers his head – but this time the unicorn does not give into the fear that grips his heart.

This time the unicorn, his horn glowing, lowers his head and pushes forward – thinking again and again about the gunshots, about that mortal cry. The unicorn thinks about Mary McGarrett – and he knows, as suddenly as if he’d been there, that she’d been no sacrifice. She’d simply been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She’d seen what was happening and had tried to help the unicorns. She had known neither the Bull nor his designs nor who it was that had commanded him – but she had known the unicorns and had wanted to help.

Grief clutches the unicorn’s heart for Mary – for that young woman – but then it is replaced swiftly with rage.

The unicorn rears and thrusts his horn forward, advancing on the Bull, driving him as he had driven the other unicorns. And over the Bull’s great shoulders, the unicorn hears them, amidst the crashing of the waves, the shrill neighing and anxious snorting of his kind, the soft clinking as their horns hit together, their cloven hooves stamping at the sand as they anxiously waited to break past the Bull.

The Bull tries one last time to roar and turn the tide against the unicorn, but the unicorn – _gunshots, mortal scream, Mary McGarrett_ – the unicorn doesn’t let him.

The unicorn lowers his head once last time and charges and pushes the Red Bull into the ocean and, all at once, the unicorns break from the sea.

 

 

XIX.

_Things happened both swiftly and slowly as they do in dreams, where it is really the same thing._

 

From all over the state, from all over each island, there was spreading word of a white tide of water rushing from southwest to northeast that seemingly did no damage and took no lives – those who saw it could not explain it, and no camera could capture what it was. Some witnesses say there was the sound of horses, others the sound of singing. All say they couldn’t describe how they felt, nor why they were crying as they talked of it.

The unicorns cross Hawai’i in minutes before they once more disappear into the ocean – retreating to their own four corners of the world.

The unicorn, only recently named Danny by mortals, does not see his foal, but he knows all the same that she is safe and free and returning now with her mother to their forest.

 

The unicorn had almost been caught in the tide of his own kind as they escaped from the sea and it had taken all of his strength to fight against his instincts to _run_ and _run with the herd_. But the gunshots were still playing in his ears, the gunshots and the scream, and he had to know who had pulled the trigger and who had screamed.

When he returns to the intersection where he knows he’d left the mortals – and he knows it’s the right one because Steve’s truck is still there, flipped onto its side like an animal, its undersides exposed – and, just beside it, laying on his back, is John McGarrett, dead and staring up at the sky.

The unicorn whickers softly in question as he looks around for the rest of his mortals, but he gets no answer that he can hear, instead, he gets an answer that he can _see_.

A trail of glittering stardust leads away from the intersection and when the unicorn puts his head down to sniff at it – he recognizes the scent of Kono’s magic. The unicorn tosses his head, because it’s not just Kono’s magic he smells – he smells blood that’s got a familiar tang to it and his mind immediately recognizes it as Steve’s. Where Kono’s stardust trail begins is the ending of Steve’s blood trail, the latter of which tracks back to where the unicorn had left Steve standing.

Breaking off at a canter, the unicorn follows Kono’s magic.

 

The canter turns into a gallop as the unicorn senses himself closing in on Kono and Chin and Steve.

It’s easy for the unicorn to close the distance once he spots the mortals – he pulls up alongside the speeding vehicle, Chin was in the driver’s seat and Kono in the back with Steve laying down, his head in her lap. The unicorn doesn’t have to look long to see that there’s not much time left for Steve – his chest was rising and falling with shallow and shaky breathes, his skin was pale and sweaty. All of it probably (definitely) caused by the gaping wound in Steve’s gut.

As soon as Kono spots the unicorn keeping pace with the car – she shouts for Chin to pull over.

 

 

XX.

_“A unicorn’s horn is proof against death itself.”_

 

“Will you help him, Danny?” Kono asks even as she and Chin move to take Steve from the car and set him on the ground in front of the unicorn.

Steve’s eyes are half-lidded and hazy, he was looking around but not seeing much of anything until his eyes land on the unicorn – and there’s a moment of clarity, then, as if he recognized the unicorn for what he was.

The world seems to fade out around them – all the distant sounds of sirens and panicking and even the frantic cries of the birds disturbed from their roosts – all of it just ceases for the unicorn as he presses his muzzle to Steve’s cheek, huffs warm breath over Steve’s skin, before he pulls back and touches his horn to Steve’s wound. For a moment, the horn glows bright and Steve arches up off the ground with a gasp. Then the horn’s light fades and Steve collapses back to the ground, his eyes closed.

“Will he be okay?” Chin asks, his voice making the unicorn’s world abruptly re-expand to include Chin and Kono and not just Steve.

“Yes,” the unicorn says, a sadness in his voice that he can’t quite hide, “he’s resting now.”

The unicorn turns his face once more to press against Steve’s, nosing softly against the shell of Steve’s ear and half expecting the human to chuckle and shift away, maybe even open his eyes and cuss at the unicorn. With an exasperated huff at himself, the unicorn takes a pointed step away from Steve as he shakes himself.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Kono asks, starting to reach for the unicorn but stopping when she notices the blood that still covers her hands.

“What is there for a unicorn in this place?” the unicorn asks, still continuing to step away. “There are no seasons here and the animals are happy. I must return to my forest, where I am needed—”

“Danny, please—”

The unicorn stamps his hoof, interrupting Kono. “Danny was a mortal,” he snaps, irritation vying with affection and maybe something like fear at the sound of the name, “and I am mortal no longer. I am a unicorn who’s been gone too long from their forest.”

Softly, Kono says, “You’re needed here, too.”

The unicorn snorts, but he’s gentle as he says, “I am _wanted_ here – and there is a difference.”

Kono is opening her mouth to argue, but the unicorn tosses his head and arches his neck and, with one parting and longing look at Steve, he whirls away from them and runs.

 

 

XXI.

_The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone._

 

The journey home is a long one for the unicorn and made longer for his loneliness and the silence of the road – the latter of which something hadn’t ever bothered him before.

The past weeks had been filled with noise and not just those of the city and the general sounds of humanity all around him – but he’d gotten used to Chin calling for him and chatting aimlessly about this, that, or some other thing; he’d gotten used to Steve and the way they talked even when they weren’t face-to-face with that little cell phone Chin had purchased for him after a week of fielding calls from Steve for the unicorn.

“Here,” Chin had said, thrusting the device into the unicorn’s hands. “Now I don’t have to feel like I’m in high school, passing notes for classmates.”

The unicorn hadn’t understood the reference, but he had listened closely as Chin explained how to send texts and make calls. He had tried to explain the internet and Google, too, but the unicorn had no need for them, so he’d dismissed the explanations with a wave of a hand.

The unicorn is grazing next to the bison once more and finds himself wondering about his human companions. He looks westward with a sigh before he turns himself east and continues on his way – galloping hard, as if his speed alone could help him outrun himself and his thoughts and his memories and the creeping feelings of regret and loss.

 

He heads towards his forest through the south – stopping only briefly to touch noses with the foal who’d started his journey. She’s small and dainty and already more graceful than her mother, who roughly paws at the moss – eager to get him out of her forest.

“You smell like mortality,” she snorts at him as he’s leaving, “and a witch’s magic.”

The unicorn thinks of a thousand different ways to defend himself – but her words cut deep and once more he finds himself running.

 

His forest has known time since he’s been away and the trees are barren, the forest floor thick with fallen leaves and frost. But the frost melts as soon as he enters and within the week, new leaves were budding – with the unicorn, spring returns to the forest.

 

Time once more slips from the unicorn’s mind as he does all he can to forget about the Red Bull and Wo Fat and even Kono and Chin and Hawai’i.

Forgetting Steve is harder, but the unicorn does what he can. So, when the unicorn hears the rumbling of a dirt bike entering his forest, he takes advantage of the distraction and gives chase to the sound. He’s almost on it when the wind changes direction, bringing with it the scent of motor oil and engine grease and—

—the unicorn stops.

He stops dead.

His ears were cocked and listening, his nostrils flaring, his forelegs trembling as his tail twitches frantically.

Then, as if time has slowed, the dirt bike flies up and over the distant ridge and the unicorn can see it and can see its rider – and, in that long, slow moment, just before the dirt bike has returned to the ground, the rider and the unicorn stare at each other in wonderment.

Joy, like none the unicorn thinks he’s ever known before, not when he’d been freed from Wo Fat’s trailer, not when he’d watched as the Red Bull disappeared into the sea and the other unicorns were freed, surges through him – forcing him up onto his hind legs as he neighs shrilly.

Then all at once the unicorn is rushing the dirt bike and its rider and, together, he and Steve McGarrett race each other through the forest.

 

 

XXII.

_… out of this story and into another._

 

Danny wakes slowly, blinks the Hawaiian sunlight out of his eyes. He turns slowly in the arms wrapped around him and when he looks up, he sees Steve’s eyelids fluttering open, too.

“Babe,” Danny says, smirking, “I had the craziest fuckin’ dream.”

 

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

>  **Brief self-harm** : when Danny becomes human, he scratches at the mark on his forehead where his horn is supposed to be.  
>  **Ambiguous ending** : tagged like this for a reason. If you don't like the ending and feel the need to comment - please remain respectful. Do not make demands.


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